Jul. 2018 : Antique & Animals

ANTIQUE & ANIMALS / Ellie Ji Yang

PRESS RELEASE

Kenektid X Gallery is pleased to present Antique & Animals By Ellie Ji Yang. A solo show on view at 1026 6th Avenue, Suite 201 in New York, from July 12th through August 2nd, 2018, with an opening reception on Thursday, July 12th.

Ellie is a Korean artist, currently based in Brooklyn NY. She holds an MFA in Illustration from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, and a BFA in Cartoon and Animation from Chosun University, South Korea. She is known for her ever heartwarming, cheerful and unfiltered-raw drawings.

Ellie Yang is an artist whose work is simultaneously aware of history and sentimentality. Her work is inhabited by familiar imagery; mountains, animals, lovers, explorers. However, these are not tropes that she engages by default. Rather, she deploys them in order to make a more significant assertion. She brings elements of history into her work as a way of addressing the relationship between her own inherited influences and her experience as a self-aware observer and documenter of the mundane. She summons the larger contextual sphere of art history by presenting Roman marbles as the protagonists of her vignettes. They become place holders for the artist herself and, more significantly, they serve as a vehicle for the viewer.

These marble figures are luxuriant and anxious in turn. Relaxing in pools of water among casually sketched butterflies and oysters. They visit museums, and touch the artifacts- overfamiliar with the practical objects now meant to be behind glass vitrines. Her figures do not lend themselves to oversimplification, her subjects are all party to certain laws of perception that she establishes by breaking or ignoring boundaries of animus. Whether they be cast in marble or flesh-tone, the inhabitants of Yang’s work are all imbued with personal charisma, and some contextual narrative. This lends them all a sense of trajectory, that we the viewer, happen to have intercepted in a posed and well-staged moment.

Her facility with the graphic technicality of an image is clear and well-honed and the work assumes very little about the viewer. Rather, it does much of the groundwork for us by graphic enticement. Her color, form and visual rhythm allow the viewer to relax and become enveloped into whatever delight is being offered. There is no opportunity to object or decline the invitation, because the vista is tailored towards delight.

In this work, the animal and the natural represents the presence of an instinct and spirit that supersedes generational or historical thinking. Yang’s work states that human experience is both mundane and everlasting. Personal and private moments join with the flow of a greater, collaborative continuity that establishes itself parallel to the narrative of both art history and personal experience because it is a hybrid of both. She uses each image’s central figure as a stand-in for the viewer, handing us our role on the stage she has set. The images are not preoccupied with the “when” of the moment but instead they describe the sensation of each experience through the charismatic doppelgängers who stand in on our behalf and, in turn, who we inhabit- seeing the world through the eyes she has crafted for us.